Interview, Riverside Studios review - old media vs new in sparky scrap between generations

The cult film that director Theo van Gogh left behind when he was killed in 2004, Interview, has already been remade twice; now it’s back as a stage play, adapted and directed by Teunkie Van Der Sluijs. It’s a modern Oleanna, but with less savagery and more slink: the  instructive clashing of two different generations.

It opens with a monologue by Pierre (Robert Sean Leonard), addressed to an unseen friend called Theo who is a resident of a “nuthouse”. With grim irony, Pierre tells Theo to stop his incessant talking: Theo is mute. Pierre apparently uses him as a sounding board for all his gripes. Today the chief one is the assignment he has been given to interview a starlet, a young woman who has graduated from filming herself for social media as a self-help influencer to becoming a film actress — make that “actor”, as she will insist to him. 

Katya (Paten Hughes, pictured below) claims to be from Georgian stock — not the one in the Deep South — though this may be a fiction as she can’t name the district or town her mother was from. She lives in an impeccably modish converted warehouse in Brooklyn, where the living room sports a shiny rolltop bath, an "iconic" item in her eyes, brought there from a film set.

We realise what a humiliation this interview is for Pierre, a fiftyish politics specialist who follows every move in DC and yearns to be at the press conference being given that night by the Vice President, as the House prepares to impeach him. Pierre believes he is the only reporter who can do justice to this story, understanding how the VP is using the impeachment for longer-term gains. Instead, as he puts it, “the worst possible people are covering the worst possible people in the White House, at the worst possible time”. Sound familiar?

Pierre is an old-school journo, despising the podcasters and selfie-takers. Katya, he predicts, will be an airhead who thinks impeachment is some kind of moisturiser. Gradually, over the course of the play’s 90 minutes, the pair strip away the layers they use to project a self-image, give up their secrets and are forced to re-evaluate the other. Or, at least, that is what seems to be happening.

The first surprise for Pierre is that Katya is both smart and funny. And an hour late for her interview. She is annoyed that the New York Courier has assigned a former foreign correspondent to talk to her, and even more irritated when he admits he hasn’t bothered to watch the new film she is there to promote, or any of the others in the same series, though he did see one called Bromeo and Juliet, which featured a topless balcony scene. She has given him “unfiltered access”, in her precious time, in her own home, and he has turned up with just a notepad. 

Things get comically scratchy quite quickly, with lots of juicy one-liners in the repartee. Pierre, who hasn’t been able to get his pieces in the Washington Post “since Bezos took over’, now has to stomach being told she has more followers than the Post. “But reach doesn’t equal worth,” he responds piously, going on to lecture her about  tawdry self-commercialisation. Does she think she does any good? Now 28, she has learned to be wary of older white men who want to revise what she says and touch up her image. He parries by telling her he has enough youth to care still, but enough age to know better. 

Adrift though Pierre is in the world of "socials", when he reveals that while a personal tragedy was happening at home, he was driving around in a Ukrainian war zone looking for the source of the ‘bots churning out disinformation aimed at American voters, he seems to be winning this authenticity contest. Especially so when Katya picks up her camera and starts filming her latest saccharine self-help lecture to her nine million followers. But then she recruits Pierre for a “collab”, obliging him to talk to her camera about himself, and things start loosening up, the scales start balancing.

Whether you find what happens in the second half of the piece remotely plausible may depend on how much you know about the protocols of celebrity interviews, especially those conducted in the US (and also perhaps on how many rattled former foreign correspondents you have met). The narrative takes a sudden lurch, and, although the one-liner count continues, Pierre is made to deliver lines to the effect of his having only one weapon, his integrity — “If you lose it, you are lost.” An alarm bell should sound at that point, especially as Pierre seems intent on establishing that it’s Katya who lacks it. There is nothing real about her, he decides, she is always performing.

It’s an easy, and lazy, prejudice about social media, especially prevalent among the dislodged old guard, who see themselves as the sole guardians of Truth. Katya’s generation knows different truths, such as her watchword: “Visibility is power.” This piece, usefully updated here and there with topical references, is an attempt to refocus the picture. Does it succeed? Partially. The writer seems to have his thumb on the scales at times so that both characters seem unfairly weighted against each other. But there is satisfaction to be had in the neat twists of the plot. 

This is an impressively staged production, making dizzying use of projections onto the walls of Katya’s apartment — phone screens, laptop videos, TV feeds, the live footage from Katya’s camera. It’s a world in which Pierre is only partially at home, whereas Katya is wholly at ease. Hughes plays her with beguiling insouciance, crisp delivery and a seductive athleticism. And Sean Leonard makes a worthy foil for her youthful canniness, an unkempt old fox with reserves of wit and guile trying to navigate an unfamiliar kind of war zone. They are very entertaining to hang out wit

Interview at Riverside Studios until 27 September

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